On Sun, 24 May 2015 11:32:35 +0100, "Ophelia" >
wrote:

>I have noticed several people here mention California. We have had a lot of
>stuff on tv about the lack of water there. We were shown the huge
>reservoirs with very little water in them. They were showing how people
>with lush grass and full swimming pools were being demonised.
>
>Is anyone here affected? It sounds very frightening!

Water has been in short supply in California since forever, and we've
tended to tune out the warnings, but this time it seems to finally be
getting very real.

But even now it's complex. Even in this drought there is enough water
to go around if the 5% of the crops that are the big water wasters
were shifted to something else. Urban water usage is only about 15%
of the total, depending on how you count, and landscape is about half
of that.

There are some farms in the delta with historic, premptive rights to
water and they are slow to give it up voluntarily - just this week
agreed to cut back by 25%, but it won't even be monitored, and it's
also not clear that water that gets to them will be used by anyone
else anyway, it's already too far downstream.

Everyone has known for a century that the day would come when
California would have to do SOMETHING about water, and that day has
arrived. Desalination is pretty much the solution for the coastal
cities, but we might need 100 plants the size of the Carlsbad plant
being completed this year, and the anti-growth idiots like our
Governor Moonbeam are fighting it all the way. It might triple the
cost of urban water. BTW, do you know what it costs today, in Los
Angeles, for a gallon of water out of the faucet?

For agriculture the long-term solution is harder, they are used to
getting water at 1/10 the price of urban water or less, much less.
And they're not on the coast, so just pumping water there would raise
the price as well. I suspect a century from now you will see 10,000
square miles of California farmland covered by greenhouses.

I actually got in a bit of a panic about this just about a month ago,
when we got to the end of the rainy season and it punked out on us
again, and I read that the last 100 years of weather in California
have been unreasonably WET, the average for the 1,000 years before
that is about what we've been getting recently, or worse! Ooops.

It could get really bad since our politicians are such idiots. But it
is mostly fixable, if people would just get off their asses.

J.